Tag archives: justice
“Radical” is often used to disqualify an idea as “extreme.” Did you know that it comes from the same origin as “radish” and means to “go to the root” of a problem? Every night, the news is full of the crisis at the US-Mexico border. The “analysis” is limited to the immediate humanitarian issues along […]
The Most Vicious Rapist-Killer in California History Brought to Justice It was a mid-summer’s night in 1981 and Debbi Domingo, a junior at Santa Barbara High School, was just ending her shift at the Granada Theatre on State Street. She was handed a message from her mother’s best friend. “Please come home,” the message read. […]
Writing this column on Juneteenth, I am reminded of Bryan Stevenson’s fabulous 2014 book Just Mercy. In it, he observes that “Capital punishment means, ‘them without capital get the punishment’…” Stevenson ends the description of his first experience with prisoners on Georgia’s death row with this musing, “My short time on death row revealed that […]
The two original sins of this nation are the systematic genocide of Native Americans and slavery. Both were the result of overt racism which has become so imbedded in our culture that we’re now left with only this choice: either be racist, or be anti-racist. There is no longer any middle ground. It’s not going […]
On April 4 1940, during an early stage of World War II, which American journalists dubbed “The Phoney War,” because not much actual fighting was going on, prime minister Neville Chamberlain, who had led Britain into the war, addressed his Conservative Party with a speech in which he used a common metaphor in a rather […]



